


A City Without Walls

by xaara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Death, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 03:12:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3193127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaara/pseuds/xaara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU after 5.10: Bobby and Castiel sacrifice themselves to give the others a shot at Lucifer, and Jo is left barely holding things together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A City Without Walls

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [cho_malfoy](http://cho-malfoy.livejournal.com/) as part of [SPN Summergen 2010](http://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/).
> 
> Deaths are off-screen.

The hardware store exploded and then caught and burned behind her. Sparks flew at the sky and disappeared, and if she'd been the sort to pray she would have. As it was, she had not much in the way of love for man and even less for God, so when Dean and then Sam stopped to look back she stopped too but did not turn.  
  
Dean watched the fire burn like he had never seen anything so perfect. His eyes shone huge and green and tearless. She thought he might speak, but his mouth moved without words, so she paid her attention instead to Sam, whose hand was out as if to catch Dean. He didn't touch his brother, and after a while lowered his hand. He stood half-turned and tense, like something might spring from the shadows or Dean might make a move into them.  
  
"Dean," Sam said after what felt like hours. The fire had found fuel and lost it again, the store collapsed to a heap of slag that smoldered and smoked. A whoosh as something new sparked—kerosene, Jo thought, campstoves. Flame licked from a corner of the property up into a sapling that shivered as the fire ate away its leaves and new growth and burrowed to the trunk.  
  
Sam said, "Dean," again, and this time he did reach out to his brother and touched his elbow and drew him back unresisting.  
  
They walked away, smell of smoke like too-close lightning. In the darkness, Jo found her mother's hand and held it. Calluses against calluses, rough hunter's palms. She thought again about praying and wondered whether Cas would have wanted something said over him, being God's, and then she thought that with the lot of them left, he'd have to make do with being God's and forego the words.  
  
"It's okay," Ellen said. "It'll be okay." Over and over, until the words wore like melting snow down a mountain and carved gullies into the ache in her.

 

\--

Lucifer found them as they huddled along the edge of the ditch, trying to return to the vehicles without tipping off the town full of possessed people standing staggered through the adjacent field like scarecrows. The thick scent of wet mud rose from beneath their feet, and the ground pulled at the tread on Jo's boots.  
  
"Well," said Lucifer, grinning through the man he wore. "Well, look at our little ragged band."  
  
Jo heard someone growl behind her and thought it must have been Dean, so she stepped forward and lashed the end of her gun around. There was no pain, just surprise, and her mother's voice, and black.

 

\--

She woke on Bobby's couch. Above her, a crack ran the width of the ceiling and disappeared into the crown molding that ringed the room. She breathed as deeply as she could and felt the strain against her ribs and the lurch in her stomach. Her head throbbed. On a chair across the room, Ellen dozed, and then Sam came in and saw Jo was awake and whispered, "You hungry?"  
  
As he asked, her stomach growled. He smiled a little at the corner of his mouth, said he guessed that meant yes. He helped her up quietly so Ellen would keep sleeping and guided her into the kitchen.  
  
Dean stood staring out of the window. Sam moved around him without entering his space. Dean had something in his hand, and when Jo looked closer she saw it was the picture they'd taken earlier, crumpled and lined at the center as if he'd tried to tear it but couldn't. While Sam busied himself with sandwiches and milk, she turned to Dean and said, "I'm sorry."  
  
He looked at her. The rage in his eyes wasn't directed at her but she felt it anyway like radiated heat and took a step back. In a minute he focused and saw her over what he had been seeing. "Sorry," he muttered. "How's the head?" gesturing at his own forehead.  
  
"He who fights and runs away," she said. He snorted like he didn't disagree, and Sam handed her a plate with a sandwich cut on the diagonal. She and Dean shared a look at that and for a moment she felt like someone had snatched her back from a clifftop, caught her waist and held her warm and tight, and she leaned into the warmth and ate her sandwich and didn't think.

 

\--

She'd slept on the couch once already and slept there again after sundown, Ellen on first watch and the boys upstairs. As she slept, she dreamed that she was flying and then she tired and landed on a mountain. It rose high and dark, cold wind rushing this far over the tree line, so she looked in a circle for shelter and saw two stones shouldered together and walked until she could duck under the lean-to they made. It was dark but somehow she could still see. She paused at the figure sitting in the shelter before sitting next to him.  
  
"Hey, Jo," said Bobby. He sat with his back to one of the boulders and his legs splayed out before him.  
  
"What're you doing here?"  
  
"It's your dream," he said. He turned his head and his torso turned with it, but his legs only shifted with the changed gravity.  
  
"I'm sorry things happened like they did."  
  
"I know."  
  
They sat like that together for a while. The wind died and grew again, like someone up the mountain was at work on a giant bellows. Beside her boots, the brown weeds that dared life this far up fluttered in the breeze. Down past the rock face and the plain, past the Krummholz firs, she heard rain begin to fall. She looked up and there were still stars, but soon they began to blink under clouds and the rain pattered closer.  
  
"Time for you to get out of here," Bobby said.  
  
"You're coming," she said, and crawled next to him to hook his arm over her shoulders.  
  
"I'm gone, kiddo," he said, and touched her face with fingers so cold she knew he was right and she woke choking.

 

\--

From a dead man's house, they made ready for war. Dean and Jo sat across from each other at the table to clean the arsenal while Sam made calls to undisclosed sources. Later, she heard Dean yelling at him, yelling that he wasn't going to lose his brother to the goddamn devil and Sam could keep all ideas in that line to his own fucking self. Sam said something quiet, and Dean screamed back, "Fine, fucking destroy the world and don't forget to pack a fucking lunch!" and a door slammed and booted feet on the stairs rattled the pictures and went outside.  
  
She found Dean outside on the porch steps. He had a bottle of whiskey next to him unopened and she picked it up and set it out of arm's reach. He made a protest but she ignored him and sat down close enough next to him to feel his warmth. It occurred to her to ask whether he was all right, but she knew the answer to that already and so said nothing.  
  
"Brother's a fucking idiot," said Dean.  
  
"Why I got lucky being an only child," she said. Dean snorted out a laugh and the line of his spine relaxed by degrees.  
  
She shuffled her left foot over so it touched the side of his right foot. The moon glinted off the cars gutted and stacked into the darkness, broken windshields like gaping mouths feeding appetites beyond reason. At the edge of the salvage yard, a small creature scuttled, and she and Dean tensed in unison and sat back again when a rat blinked at them and retreated into the safety of twisted metal. Dean threw a wood chip after it, which seemed to have no effect on the tempo of retreating feet.  
  
"Shit week," he said finally.  
  
Jo nodded. "Shit year," she said. "Shit life."  
  
"Not everybody who can get Bobby Singer and an angel of the fucking Lord killed in one go."  
  
She looked up at that, at the tight draw of his mouth. "Wasn't your fault," she said, and knocked their knees together too, remembering a time when she would have kissed him. Now, she thought, she might not be so much an only child as the brat little sister. The notion didn't upset her like it should.  
  
"I know," he said, "and it wasn't like either of em was any kind of lamb to the slaughter, either, but."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"I made Bobby's life hell, you know, growing up. And Cas, he literally went through Hell for me. And Sam, he's up there talking like, talking like I don't even fucking know. Like something's over."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"I guess I just— Don't you dying on me, Jo, you got that?"  
  
She nodded and said, "Yeah," again. They sat in silence. She listened to him breathe and thought about how miraculous breathing was, how the air filtered in through your nose and mouth and down your throat and into your lungs and blood. Invisible, what was there around you—made by billions of years of accidents—and you breathed it in and somehow it turned out you kept living. Everything a big accident, the earth still reeling, the oceans reeling, everyone fighting for balance.  
  
After a while, he said, "Bout time for me to take watch," and stood and stretched.  
  
"I think I'll stay out here for now," she said.  
  
"Okay," he said, and froze for a beat before he reached down and ruffled her hair. "You keep sharp." He went inside but left the door ajar.  
  
Jo bent and unlaced her boots and worked them off. She wiggled her toes in the night air and slid them across the worn grain of the steps until they hooked over the edge. The night was cold, her fingers taut with it. The moon hung nearly gone overhead, like someone had snuffed it with a thumb, the barest edge clawing free. Still, it cast enough light that she could pick out the lines of the cars, the outbuildings, a half-collapsed tent. Waiting still for something to happen, waiting for a moment.  
  
She rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands and stared at the wrecks until they made one mass of potential energy. Better than the sum of parts.  
  
I'll get up soon, she thought, and tucked her chin down. Her breath brushed warm over her fingers. She felt the porch and her body against it, imagined growing tree roots and living here forever unbothered. She curled her toes tighter and and imagined pulling water and nutrients up into herself and spreading green tribute to the sky. I'll get up any second now, she thought, any second now.


End file.
